Cool Dude Meets Julie Andrews

Harsh words were said. Items were dumped from drawers. A suitcase was packed. A paintbrush lay in a congealing pool of yellow paint in a room half-painted. We, unwilling participants in a dispute over money that churned with childhood echos and blurred images of how things should be, retreated unhappily to our corners. At times, we are both wounded and dramatic and stubborn and angry and confused and ever so vulnerable. Our feelings get hurt. We attack. We go too far.


Coming back to sanity after such a lapse is painful. It's like walking with cement boots. Each step back towards the other requires such willingness. It would be so much easier not to. But here we are, and where else is there?


It feels like pushing through heavy curtains. We reach for each other's hand, someone makes coffee, we sit on the couch in the living room, and gently begin anew.


It was there on the living room couch earlier this morning surrounded by potted plants and our favorite framed art, when I met the Cool Dude.


"Why didn't you come down to welcome me home when I came back from Long Island?" I asked. (This wasn't the basis of The Fight, but a tiny thread in my own skein of resentments.)


"I don't know," Juan the Gardener replied thoughtfully, "But, I think I have certain pictures in my mind about how couples relate. I think you do too. I think most couples do. When our images cross, we begin to have problems."


"Tell me about your pictures," I said. I felt a familiar flicker of fondness.


"Mine go way back," Juan said. "Way back to my hippie days, to when I wanted to be a Cool Dude. I had a good friend and I thought we were Cool Dudes and Cool Dudes related to one another in a certain way. We were, you know cool, laid back. When he didn't behave the way I expected, I realized for the first time that my ideas about how things should be weren't necessarily like someone else's."


"So, a Cool Dude doesn't welcome his girlfriend home with too much enthusiasm, is that it?"


"Yeah, sort of. We're cool, you and I, we don't have to get all caught up in convention. You know how much I love you. We're relaxed, we'll just relax into being back together after you've been away. Not too much effort."


"Well, I have more of a romantic idea of how couples relate," I said. "Sort of a Sound of Music idea. You rush downstairs to greet me, bearing flowers, possibly edelweiss, perhaps singing. An unseen orchestra would swell. Our lips would touch."


We laughed.


"Probably when I was hanging around with long hair imagining myself to be a Cool Dude, people were saying to themselves that guy, he's just strange," Juan said.


We laughed again.


"Yeah, I completely understand," I said. "It's like we don't know our parts in each other's plays. We haven't read the scripts, we haven't rehearsed our roles." 


We misread the cues, we flub our lines.


I looked at Juan and he looked back, and we saw each other, as if for the first time.